This is a short post on how you can see the full referring url in one report in Google Analytics (GA).

The problem:

Just a quick background for people who haven’t run into this issue yet.

If you want to segment by source in GA; the referring url is cut at the domain. Which means if you got a referral from http://news.ycombinator.com/a-great-post/ you would see it in the source as http://news.ycombinator.com/. And if you have multiple urls from the same domain we cannot see which page it come from because it will be truncated at the domain.

The solution:

The solution here is to create a filter which will put all the complete referring urls in a user defined report. Just follow these steps:

1. Go to your filter settings and create a new filter

2. Select Filter type ‘Custom Filter’ and then ‘Advanced’

3. In field A- Extract A select ‘Referral’ and in the text box type ‘(.*)’. This essentially selects the entire referring url.

4. Leave field B-Extract B as it is

5. In Output to – Constructor select ‘User Defined’ and in the text box type in $A1. This will take the complete referral of field A (denoted by $A1) and put it in a user defined report.

6. Leave the rest of the settings as they are. Which means Field A required should be selected as ‘Yes’, Field B required as ‘No’, Override output field as ‘No’ and Case Sensitive as ‘No’.

After you are done it should look something like this:

Where do you see the results:

Under Visitors goto User defined and voila! You can now see a report with the referring urls

Hack: How to See The Entire Referral URL in Google Analytics is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

You’re a startup and it’s you (the CEO), your CTO and your marketing guy in the monthly board meeting, and your investors ask “so what did you learn from the marketing activities last month?”  Don’t say something like “we’re not real sure”, or “traffic went up, but we don’t know from where” – or anything like that.  In fact, make sure you don’t fall into the old adage “I know half of my marketing is working – I just don’t know which half.”

We’re a startup too, and we know you want to be a “traffic whore.”  That’s fine – we are too – hell, we’ll link bait anything to get 2o more visits.  But as much as you want to be a traffic whore, you need to be an analytics whore too.

In fact, we like analytics so much, it’s in our name – and we have the tools to boot. (yes, that’s a photo of my iPhone…so many analytics tools I had to create a whole folder for it).  So we’re going to show you a few tools and techniques to get you to that next board meeting so you can put on a rockstar performance!

Tools

Google Analytics (Analytics Pro) - this should go without saying, but everyone should have Google Analytics running in their site.  It’s free for chrissake.

Clicky - I run Clicky because I love the Spy feature where you can see who is on your site right now and what they are clicking on.  Yeah, it’ll freak people out.

Chartbeat – this isn’t a traditional page analysis tool. This is about what’s going on right now.  It shows you people who are currently on your site, the pages they are looking at, and the average page load time.  This is cool for when you finally hit TechCrunch or Hacker News and you want to see the traffic spike real-time.  Chartbeat is different from Clicky’s Spy feature because Chartbeat keeps track of active and inactive tabs that have your page open, so you can now see who’s actively reading (or not). On Clicky Spy, once they leave the tab (even if it’s still open), the live visitor count decreases.

Floorboard – this is our home-grown reporting engine.  We also do a lot of cookie and session tracking, so I can track the behavior of account holders (like how often they log in, what they do when they log in), or the time it takes from the minute they hit the site, until they sign up for an account.  Sometimes the data out of the database is more reliable than javascript trackers.  Build one for yourself – if you need some help, let us know.  There was also that great video from Mike McDerment over at Freshbooks on “Flight Systems”.

Pear Analytics - this is our SEO tool made for the iPhone.  (Sorry, you can’t get it anymore off of iTunes because we’re going to make a waaaay better one soon.)  Until then, you can use this free seo analysis tool.

KISS Insights (not shown) - you’re going to need a page level survey to ask people what they think about your tool or service.  KISS gets a really high response rate, so you’ll get data very quickly that you can use in your next board meeting.

CrazyEgg – this is a heatmap tool that will show you the “hotspots” on your webpage.  Are people clicking where you want them to?  The results may surprise you. (And yes, I am pimping Hiten Shah a bit here with all of his tools, but hey – they guy is doing something right.)

Userfly – this is super cheap usability testing.  They record the mouse movements of random visitors to your site.  Are they doing what you want them to do?  Did they see that forward to a friend button?  Still a little clunky on ajax and javascript stuff, but totally worth the ten bucks or whatever it is.

Update 8/24/10 - thanks to Dan Martell for tweeting this post out – I totally forgot to add Flowtown to this list of must-have tools.  Flowtown basically pulls a social profile on any email you have.  So if you have a freemium product that asks for an email to signup, they will cross-reference the emails and find out who’s on any social network (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.), along with some basic demographics, AND who the influencers are.  Now for you advanced users, try overlaying this data with the user behavior data in your database.  Now you’re cooking

Techniques

Okay, now you have a shitload of tools – what do you do with them all?

1.  Set up goals - both Clicky and Google Analytics have the ability to set up goals – or conversion places – or places where people do the things you want them to.  This could be fill out a form, subscribe, or sign up.  For Pear, it’s those who come and run a free report with our product.  Now you can tell which traffic sources are converting the most.

2.  Take the time to add the proper tracking codes to your marketing activities - Google Analytics has a way to read special URL parameters so the data goes into the right place into the reports.  If you’re running a banner ad on Mashable, don’t tell them to link to just www.yoursite.com.  Append the URL like this:

www.yoursite.com/?utm_source=mashable&utm_medium=banner&utm_content=125x125a&utm_campaign=startups

Now you know which banners work the best, which campaign, which source, etc.  You can even play with banner copy and calls-to-action now.  Cool, right?  If you need help building that URL, go here to the Google URL builder tool.

3.  Build funnels for all of your activities – what you want to know is where people drop off during the process you take them through to sign up, pay you, or whatever it is you want from them.  If you are using the DaveMcClure AARRR concept (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue) – with the exception of Referral, that’s your funnel.  Make pretty little graphs for your board meeting too, like the ones below, for every marketing activity.  If it’s hard to get some of the data, that because it is sometimes.  Don’t whimp out.  If you want, you can also try KISS Metrics to do a pretty schnazzy funnel analysis.

4.  Segment, segment, segment – Google Analytics made the advanced segmentation module just for you.  Want to know out of all of your new visitors, how many went to page X AND page Y?  Create a segment.  Or maybe you want to know how many visitors stayed at least 2 minutes, AND visited at least 2 pages (one of Dave’s acquisition examples).  See how we segmented our top performing organic keywords using Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics together.

5.  Test, test, test – you want to be split testing your copy, landing pages and anything that gets a user to try your tool, or ultimately pay for it.  You might have to test different pricing structures, or even test certain features with cohorts of users.  You want to develop your code in a way where it is “test friendly” too….Rails has a plugin called “A/Bingo” made by the guy who invented the Bingo Card Creator.  There may be others out there, but in case there aren’t, you can try Google Website Optimizer or Unbounce.

6.  Know your CPL, and if you have a paywall, know your CPA – your cost per lead (CPL) and cost per acquisition (CPA) is a great way to measure what marketing activities are working and which are not.  Without doing this exercise, you may be tempted to stay with the cheaper form of marketing, even though it performs the worst.  Now what should your CPA be?  That’s up to you and your board to decide, and probably will be based loosely on what you know about the Lifetime Value of your typical customer or subscriber.  Your CPL, however, should never really exceed about 15% of the CPA limit.  That means if your CPA limit is $10 (you’re willing to spend $10 to acquire a paying customer), then you should see what marketing activities are giving you leads at $1.50 or less.

Wow!  Now you can go back to the boardroom with some real insights and data to make decisions!  And that’s what your investors want – they want to know what you learned from your experiments in trying to find a repeatable, scalable business model.  We’re by no means the experts here, but if we can help you, please reach out to me – ryan at pearanalytics dot com.  Oh, also be sure to read Steve Blank and Eric Ries.

Startups: Get All The Analytics You Can is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

This is an instructional post for advanced use of Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics to uncover insights about organic keywords driving traffic to your website.  It’s a bit long, but bear with me – the results will be valuable to you

If you’ve been using Google Analytics, then you might be familiar with all of the new changes in the past year, like asynchronous code, advanced segmentation, custom reporting, and much more.  Equally, Google has been making quite a few upgrades to Webmaster Tools as well.  They now show you things like duplicate title tags, meta descriptions, links to your site, and now search queries.

We’re going to show you how to combine the search query data from Webmaster Tools and conversion data from Analytics to uncover which of your organic keywords are performing the best, and how to determine which keywords you should focus on ranking higher.

Step 1 – log into your Webmaster Tools account.  If you don’t have one, you’ll need to sign up and paste a meta tag on your site to identify yourself.  Once logged in, go to “Your site on the web > Search queries.”  You should see a screen like the one below. (Click on any image to enlarge it).

This table is showing you all of the search queries that are driving clicks to your website.  Much like paid search, you see Impressions (number of times Google showed your listing in the SERPs), Clicks (self-explanatory), CTR (click-through rate) and the Average Position.  Sort the data by the CTR column first.  This shows you your most successful keywords where folks are most likely to click on your listing.  You can even select the “+” next to the keyword and see which pages are being listed in the SERP (search engine results page).

Step 2 – favorite your top keywords by highest CTR first.  You can also favorite words that have an Average Position between 1 and 10, since these are words you rank on the first page for.  What you are really interested in here is the number of Impressions for each word.  You’ll want to use the data from Google Analytics to see how many visits you are getting from this word to determine the CTR, which is going to vary from Webmaster Tools (WMT).

Step 3 – now go into your Google Analytics account and get a keyword report by going to “Traffic Sources > Keywords.”  Be sure the date range selected is the same as  what was selected in Webmaster Tools (very important!).  Now you can see how many visits each keyword has brought to the site.  Your keyword list should come close to the list you sorted in WMT.

Step 4- determine the goal you have set for your website.  It could be a goal you set, or even a particular page that was viewed.  For Pear, we’re interested in any new visitors who came through on a particular organic search term (like “free seo analysis”) AND ran a free report (which means they viewed the /free-seo-report/* page).  Now I just went in and set up an Advanced Segment to figure this out

Now we know the following information:

• How many impressions for “free seo analysis” from WMT;
• The average ranking for “free seo analysis”
• how many new visits we received from “free seo analysis”
• how many of those visitors did what we wanted them to, which is run a free report

I can also take it one step further, and actually see how many visitors who find our site from a particular keyword, actually come BACK and engage with us further.  That’s pretty valuable, because now I can really figure out which keywords I want to put time and energy into to rank higher, and drive more traffic from.  So I create a simple funnel analysis for each of my Top 10 keywords, like this:

With this information, I can do several things to improve the CTR, or on-page conversions, such as:

• make sure my title tag and meta description are in line with the keywords I’m targeting.  Maybe they are not stimulated by the wording to click on our listing?
• dynamically generate the H1 tag on the home page to match the keywords the user searched for.  So if they searched for “free website seo analysis”, my H1 changes to that when they reach the target landing page.
• I can test and modify the page to get the user to analyze their site.  That’s why we removed the email and sign up requirement.

Now you are empowered to go and do this for your website!  Your first try at this may take you the better part of an afternoon, but you can set up some automation to get the data easier next time (i.e. favorites in WMT, advanced segments in Analytics, etc.)

Mashup: Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics Provide Powerful Insights is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

A couple of my good friends over at MailFinch, an on-demand direct mail service, and Upstack, a site where you can hire designers to do whatever you need, have both been using ReTargeter.com to drive visitors back to their site.  The way it works is a visitor comes to your site, and ReTargeter puts a cookie on the visitor.  Once the visitor leaves, and goes to another website, there’s a good chance they will see a banner ad from you.  And I’m talking about sites like Huffington Post, LA Times, Wall Street Journal and many more.  It’s all driven to get people to come back, hence the name “ReTargeter,” and so only those people who came to your site and got the cookie will see the ads.

From what Paul and Wes tell me, it’s been pretty successful.  Being an analytics guy, I ask “well how do you know that ReTargeter is sending any traffic back to you?”.  Their response: not real sure, but it feels like it’s working.  People are continuously commenting that they see their banner ads all over the place, and that “they must be spending a fortune on advertising.”  Even ReTargeter mentions this benefit in one of their case studies published on the site.

So the question remains, how do I track these ads better?

Well, the answer is pretty easy.  If you are using Google Analytics, they allow you to append the URL with a string of various parameters to identify a particular ad campaign, banner type, and more.  It’s a great way to see which variation of what ad seems to be working the best, and I don’t have to depend on ReTargeter data if I don’t want to.

So instead of linking every banner to http://www.pearanalytics.com,

I link each banner differently, such as http://www.pearanalytics.com/?utm_source=Retargeter&utm_medium=banner&utm_content=728x90a&utm_campaign=comebacks
To build a URL just like this, use the Google URL builder here.

Where you can see in the URL parameter the source of the ad (ReTargeter), media type (banner), content, or banner size (728×90 version a) and the campaign is “comebacks”.  All of this is recognizable by Google Analytics, and you can now segment your visitors by any one, or several of these parameters.  For instance, you might be interested in which 728×90 banner is performing best (assuming you have a conversion goal set up), so you can determine which copy or messaging is resonating the best.

The problem with just specifying a generic URL, or even a special landing page, won’t give you the data you need to truly segment your visitors and determine their source.  The source may come from many places and may not be readily noticeable in your Referral Source, so tagging the URL with these parameters will give you the insight you need to determine if the campaign is working for you (or not).

Optimization Idea #2: Try banners that talk to the visitor as if they already know you.

As I sifted through the many banner ad examples on ReTargeter.com, I noticed something interesting: no one was creating ad copy that spoke to the visitor as if they already knew who you were.  If I went to website A, then later was surfing on Yahoo News, and saw a banner from website A saying “hey, come back here!” – I think it would make me look twice, versus a regular ‘ol banner with “hi, we do this, and this, and click here to get a discount” type of banner.

So we’re going to try a couple things, and using our nifty URL tracking code for Google Analytics above, test to see if direct copy works better than indirect copy.

Which one do you think will work best?

How To Get The Most Out of ReTargeter.com is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

We’ve been using the heck out of the annotation feature in Google Analytics, and here’s why: because we can correlate traffic to activity.

For the most part, it’s going to be your marketing activities. But it could be things like you were on vacation from date A to date B, and maybe that’s why your traffic went down. Or maybe your server was down on Friday morning, and that’s why your traffic came to a screeching halt.

I’ve also been annotating when we send emails out to our user base as well, even though MailChimp does a good job of tying into Google Analytics – I’d rather just roll over the note on the graph, rather than have to pinpoint the date range, and then go and look at the Visitor Sources.

To add a note, simply roll over the date you wish to add a note to, and then click the “Create new annotation.” It’s quite simple. Other folks who have access to your account can also add notes, and it will track who said what.  While it does allow you to add multiple notes on a single date, it does not allow you to create a note over a date range.  Bummer.  That would be useful if for instance you did a direct mail drop over a 3 or 4 day period, right?  Maybe they’ll add that later, but for now you just have to hack it by putting a note for “direct mail start” and another note for “direct mail end” or something like that.

Either way, it’s a pretty cool feature, if I do say so myself.

Why You Should Use the Annotation Feature in Google Analytics is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

This is our fourth post in the ‘Small Business Series‘ which features where we feature industry leaders on how small businesses can better leverage their strengths.  This week we are interviewing Hiten Shah, the founder of three successful startups (Survey.io, Crazy Egg and Kissmetrics) on understanding metrics that a small business should focus on. I have been using Crazy Egg for a while now and its a great tool to understand click patterns, and just yesterday tried out KissInsights (a new product as part of Kissmetrics).  KissInsights is one of the best feedback tools I have seen, I am not a fan of the pop-up technique of inviting people to participate in surveys and love the widget you have to install.

Romy Misra (Pear Analytics): First Hiten, thanks so much for taking out the time to do this. Why is it important to develop metrics for success for small businesses? How does one develop these metrics?

Hiten Shah: I believe that the metrics for success are important in any business, because they can be used to help the whole organization focus on a single goal. If you pick the right metrics for success, you will be able to significantly improve the focus of the whole team and thus improve your business. Developing these metrics should be done first by making hypothesis about your business and validating / invalidating these hypothesis. From there you will have a good base understanding that will allow you to determine what metrics to focus on and how to define success for your business.

Romy Misra (Pear Analytics): Most businesses make the mistake of not evaluating their metrics over time. How should metrics evolve with as a startup/ small business grows?

Hiten Shah: Before a company has reached “product /market” fit, I’d be looking at a qualitative product / market fit metric. One example is the must-have metric, defined by a veteran marketer named Sean Ellis. He recently did an interview where he talks about it: http://venturehacks.com/articles/sean-ellis-interview We also created a product: http://survey.io to help people measure product/market fit by asking the must-have question.

After product/market fit I’d say for most businesses the most important metrics will probably be tied to a/b testing, marketing expenditures and revenue.

Romy Misra (Pear Analytics): One of the other frequent mistakes we have seen is that small business owners see SEO and Web Analytics as separate entities and do not tie them in with  their business goals. How would you tie in various web analytics data (clickstream analysis, heatmaps) with your SEO?

Hiten Shah: At the end of the day you are trying to convert visitors who come to your website, regardless of what “channel” they come from. So I’d say that you have to setup an analytics system to help you track conversions and than determine how various channels are converting.

Search Engine Optimization is just one of these channels.

Romy Misra (Pear Analytics): Most SMB’s I talk to feel overwhelmed by the top positions in Google. Even when the product is remarkable, ranking well in Google can be very  difficult.  In such a scenario which SEO metrics would you recommend a small  business to track?

Hiten Shah: I would focus on the traffic that the business is currently getting and than determine opportunities that the business is missing out on. Many times instead of focusing on keywords that can drive the largest volume, I would focus on long-tail keywords which might be easier to obtain top positions for in Google.

Romy Misra (Pear Analytics): One of the challenges we see with funnel optimization for small  businesses is that there is no benchmark for funnel optimization. How important are benchmarks? Also, how can an SMB use Kissmetrics the best way to optimize their funnels?

Hiten Shah: My recommendation is to always baseline your own funnel and than use that to drive improvement. There is little value in trying to understand benchmarks for an “industry” without understanding your own current conversion rates. KISSmetrics is designed to help companies optimize their funnels, we start by encouraging people to baseline their funnel and then help them make improvements. Funnel optimization not only requires metrics but also requires qualitative feedback from customers as well as creativity.

Romy Misra (Pear Analytics): Lastly, as a founder of three successful startups, please share with us three  important things you have learned along the the way!

Hiten Shah: Here are my top three :

1. Getting an early understanding of customers and thus your market is
critical to long-term success.
2. Great customer service and support creates lasting loyalty.
3. Don’t be afraid to be wrong, in fact you should go into your
business knowing that many of your assumptions will be wrong.

Understanding Metrics that Matter – Interview with Hiten Shah is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

This is the second post in our “Small Business Series” where we are interviewing a few industry experts on how small businesses can better leverage their strengths. Today we are interviewing Ken Hilburn, from Juice Analytics, one of my personal favorite data visualization companies, on how to create awesome surveys. Surveys are traditionally one of the best ways to understand your customers, but at the same time getting your customers to participate and engage in surveys is a huge challenge. I thought of interviewing Ken when I took a survey Juice Analytics sent to me by email, and it was the most engaging survey I had taken in months.

Note: As a bonus, Ken has generously shared that survey with us.

Romy Misra (Pear Analytics) : First Ken, thanks so much for taking the time to do this. The importance of surveying your customers has been repeatedly talked about. Why do you think it is important to survey your online customers/visitors?

Ken Hilburn: I have to start off by saying that Juice Analytics has an awesome community and we love talking, listening and working with them. But even with such a strong group, it’s critical to talk less and listen more.
It used to be, for the most part, that customers were at the mercy of vendors when it came to communication – it was pretty much a one-way street. However, that’s changing now. With the pervasive use of social media sites, there has been a tremendous shift toward “power to the people.” It’s certainly in a company’s best interest at this point to make sure they’re in touch with their customers and how well their customer’s needs are being met. We get to choose: we can either do that proactively, or we can wait to see it on the twitter “Popular Topics” list and hope it’s positive.

Romy Misra (Pear Analytics) : The existing ways of inviting your customers to take a survey can be interrupting, generally in the form of annoying pop ups. What in your experience have been the best ways for asking your customers to participate in a survey?

Ken Hilburn: At Juice Analytics, we’ve always tried super hard to be as un-intrusive as possible to the user’s experience. It’s baked into the way we interact on every level with our community and clients from mailing lists, to surveys, to our applications. We believe that if you create valuable product (be it information, services, or software) people will proactively engage – Seth Godin has been great at reminding us you shouldn’t have to yell at someone to get their attention.
When it came to our recent survey on the whether or not we were helping our fans be more effective in their companies, we decided to use two primary channels for requesting feedback. The first was to post a link to the survey on our blog, which has a very broad and strong following. The second channel was to send an email to those who had opted in to receiving information from Juice. We didn’t believe using pop-ups on the website for survey participation was warranted. Pop-ups are annoying and should only be used in cases where you need to collect information from an otherwise unreachable audience regarding a very specific, quick turn-around topic.

Romy Misra (Pear Analytics): Avinash Kaushik has talked widely about limiting your survey to 4 important questions using the 4q model. Are there any ‘best survey practices’ one should follow?

Ken Hilburn: We’re big fans of Avinash and what he does. And that’s no different when it comes to his 4Q model. However, our survey objectives are a little different from what the 4Q model was intended to address. For instance, in our most recent case we were more interested in learning about the general information visualization environment in our community’s companies, rather than user experience on the web site. As a result, here are the principles we used when constructing our survey:
* Participants have to have the option to avoid it altogether (see question 2).
* It has to be short enough that someone can complete the whole thing in less that 5 minutes – preferably less than 3… or 1.
* The final results have to not only be useful by Juice, but also useful by the participants. We wanted this criteria since we were going to offer the results back to the community.
* Above all, it has to be fun. Juice believes that many see our domain as dry and boring. So, we try very hard to make our community engagements friendly and entertaining. We saw this survey to be the perfect challenge for us to turn the “ultimate boring” into something people had fun doing. Based on the feedback (and responses) that we received, we achieved our objective.

Romy Misra (Pear Analytics): Can you share with us your ideas of how to keep your customers engaged during a survey?

Ken Hilburn: We’re living in an age where attention spans are getting shorter and shorter. Folks will only do something as long as they want to. We used several concepts to encourage completion:

* We used a personal, friendly tone to try to get our participants comfortable with the survey.
* Attempted to get participants to look forward to the next question by by transforming typically boring questions into interesting ones. For instance, the very first question was about company size. Instead of asking “is your company 1000-5000 employees”, we asked:

In terms of size, which of the following is your company most like?

• A one man band
• The Dirty Dozen
• The University of Rhode Island
• Microsoft

Finally, questions have to be worded in an easy to read, understand and respond to fashion. When people start having to think about their responses, their progress slows and they start to bail on the survey.

Romy Misra (Pear Analytics): Could you share your experience at Juice Analytics of surveying your readers and what you guys did to achieve a success rate?

Ken Hilburn: Since our readers are engaged because they’re interested in how to look at data in innovative ways, we promised to display results using alternative charting styles. To do this, we had to break the #1 survey rule: stay away from text based answers. In this survey, about half of our questions were text based (as opposed to multiple choice). This required more effort on the back end from us, but think the benefit we got was better participation.
As I mentioned earlier, we posted the survey on our blog first and then did an email invitation to participate. With respect to the email, we had an over 35% open rate, a 45% click rate and a 60+% completion rate. The overall result was that we had over 500 respondents. Again, we have an awesome community that really supports us and the work we do. As a result we treat them with a great deal of respect and try to make our communications feel very personal. People like this.

Romy Misra (Pear Analytics): There are so many survey tools out there. Which one(s) would you recommend using?

Ken Hilburn: There are a lot. There’s even some good ones (ha!). I think selecting a tool has to be based on what you’re trying to accomplish. Here’s the criteria we used:
* Had to support a wide variety of question types (like rating, ranking, and conditional sequencing)
* Questions had to be easy to enter into the system (spend your time _creating_ a great survey, not administering it)
* The presentation of questions to the participants had to be in format that achieves our very high standard of aesthetic quality.
* The final results had to be easily exportable in their entirety since we wanted to perform some in depth analysis and visualization.
* We preferred that it integrate with our email marketing tool.
We’ve tried several different methods of collecting user information. The first and most flexible is Google Apps forms. We like this because the results get populated directly into a Google spreadsheet which is then easy to manipulate results. We also like Survey Monkey because it’s super simple and quick to set up. For our most important surveys, we have used Constant Contact’s offering because it allows us to target and track our audience more effectively.

Romy Misra (Pear Analytics): What is your recommended ideal number of participants in a survey which should enable a company takes action on the feedback gained (eg: make changes to a site, add features to a product etc) ?

Ken Hilburn: Being the engineer that I am, I’d love to say: “100% of your user base, of course.” But we all know that’s not really a reasonable expectation. I’d have to say that it has to be a high enough percentage of your user base that you feel there’s a justification for change. However, I’d also say that when it comes to changing the way your customers engage with your site or product, proceeding based solely on a survey should be done cautiously. Once a survey indicates that a change might be warranted, try some A/B testing or more focussed user group sessions to confirm your assumptions. These days both of these options are becoming much more affordable. In the long run, you’ll see a much more positive improvement.

———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

Ken works with the Juice community and customers to help them better understand how to incorporate information presentation best practices into their world. He’s known for applying his structured approach and deep customer experiences to enable clients to implement targeted information solutions.

Once again, check out the totally awesome survey that Juice Analytics created to engage customers. We’ll definitely be trying some of these tactics out with our customer surveys in the near future.

The Art of Creating Super Awesome Surveys is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

The Pear Analytics Website Analyzer tool has analyzed nearly 5,000 unique websites since we launched it in March this year.  We’ve helped many website owners make changes themselves with our “Fisher-Price” instructions to get their site more search engine friendly.

Now we’ve kicked it up a notch.  Now we’re offering to fix parts of the site for you – and for cheap.  A good portion of your searchability issues are going to be related to the technical side of your website – a place where many avoid due to the complexity and fear of breaking something.

There are 2 options for you too – we will fix the problem and you install the changes, or for a bit more, we will fix and install the changes for you.  If you want us to install it, we will simply send you an invitation to allow us to briefly access your computer while we work our magic.

Give it a shot and start the process by analyzing your website.

I’d love to know what you think.

Website Analyzer Identifies Issues and Now Fixes Them is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

While doing research on page load times, I came across a lot of articles regurgitating the same study. Getting deeper into it, there were many more discussion forums where people did not agree with the studies. The most recent study on page load times and customer retention was done by a company who sells a service optimizing load times. So of course, they made a simple questionnaire asking people how long they would wait for a page to load and found most people would wait less than 4 seconds. Many people pointed out that it would depend on the kind of page they were trying to load, whether they had broadband or not, the age of the visitor as well as many other factors.
So the question is, is a study done by a company who’s selling a service really impartial? Can it be trusted, or will they skew the results in their favour?
How long will you wait for a website to load? Is 4 seconds too long? Does it depend on the website? Will you wait longer for a specific site or go search for something else?

Can you take a study seriously? is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.

That’s right – you can’t measure everything online that you might think.  Analyzing click traffic on websites has become much more difficult to get anything close to accurate.

One of the most difficult problems to solve is the issue with giving proper credit to the “original source” of the lead or sale.  Some of the PPC systems refer to this as the “assist” and they pass special tracking cookies to the user that will help indicate in the click stream data future visits from this user.  This typically helps credit PPC campaigns and reduces the cost per acquisition (CPA) for that channel.

This is great, but it is flawed.  This generally assumes that the visitor used one computer, and few of us use one computer.  We usually have an office computer, a home computer (we have 2), plus mobile devices.

Consider this situation (which is probably quite typical):

1.  Husband is searching for vacation spots for his family during his lunch at work.  He does several searches, including hitting a few paid ads.
2.  He runs out of time and has to get back to work, so he emails himself the links to the pages of the sites he liked to his home email account so he can show his wife later that evening.
3.  He gets on email at home and pulls up the pages on his home computer to show his wife and kids what he found.
4.  They continue to do more research and even bookmark a few sites/pages and will revisit in a couple of weeks so they can think about it.
5.  They revisit the site a few weeks later by hitting the saved bookmark and from there, decide to purchase.

Now in this case, it’s going to be virtually impossible for the marketer to track this sale all the way back to the paid search ad because he lost him as soon as he switched computers (if he is even using cookie and campaign tracking in the analytics software).  And if this happens often enough, he will think his paid search campaign is ineffective because it is not driving any sales.

Newsflash: most people don’t buy anything on the first visit!

There is likely going to be multiple interactions, extensive research, bookmarking, etc. before any purchase is made over a several-week (depending on the product) sales cycle.

Secondly, consumers are not going to be as compulsive in a down economy and are going to be looking around for deals, so we can’t possibly expect them to purchase on the first visit from a Google ad.

So what can we do about this?

Well, not too much, unfortunately.  However, if you have an e-commerce site selling any sort of products, you can reduce this phnomenon by simply having a “Favorites” or “Wish List” area of the site where a user can quickly and easily open a free account and save what they like straight on your site. This would eliminate the need to bookmark and email and cookie track everything.  You would have all of the data on your site, and now you could even do session tracking by username and get other interesting information (beware that session tracking has additional privacy issues that you will want to look at closely).

Many of the large sites like Amazon, eBay and others have this feature, but even for small or medium sized business, most of the 3rd party off-the-shelf e-commerce applications (like X-Cart, Magento) have Wish List capabilities.

Happy tracking!

You Can’t Measure Everything Online is a post from Pear Analytics, an SEO tools and software company.